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17 August 2015

Walking with Mr Turner in Martigny

In 1800 Napoleon Bonaparte crossed
the Great St Bernard Pass with his 40,000 strong army. A heroic feat which
certainly appealed to the contemporary Romantic imagination of the time. Like
Hannibal and Charlemagne before him, he was a modern embodiment of ‘a superhuman power pitted against the
supernatural terrain.’ The feat, and the man himself, were immortalised in
Jacques-Louis David’s contemporary portrait – Napoleon on the St Bernard Pass.

Yet only two years later, in 1802 –
during the brief Peace of Amiens – a different painter actually made the same mountain
crossing for himself. Only 27 years old at the time, but already at the top of
his profession and widely regarded as the most outstanding British landscape
painter of his generation, J.M.W. Turner was travelling on his first tour of
continental Europe. In later years, unlike his contemporary countryman, the
landscape painter John Constable, who never left Britain at all, Turner became
a frequent traveller in Europe. Despite a poor aptitude for foreign languages
Turner’s confidence was ever undaunted. His first tour, travelling in style in
the company of an aristocratic patron, must have set the pattern – even though
subsequent trips were made alone and as cheaply as possible. Turner’s unabashed
adventurousness was perhaps matched only by his natural curiosity and his
artistic acuity – the body of works he created whilst on this first Alpine tour
is regarded by critics as peerless.

According to David Blayney Brown, “No painter before Turner, and none since, has
so truly grasped the wilderness and grandeur of the mountains, their beauty,
their savagery and their tragic loneliness. And here, of course, he left the
Grand Tourists far behind. They had hurried through the Alps to acquire polish
and sample the pleasures of Italy, but for Turner they were an education in
themselves, confirming – if confirmation were needed – his commitment to the
art of landscape, and raising his conception and techniques to new heights.”

It’s thought that Turner probably
saw a version of Jacques-Louis David’s epic portrait of Napoleon sat astride
his rearing steed atop the St Bernard Pass when passing through Paris. And it is
certainly appealing to speculate, as Blayney Brown does, that in retracing the
same arduous mountain crossing, Turner “…
doubtless heard local stories from the guide of the real details of the 1800
crossing – how Napoleon had based himself in Martigny directing supplies before
rejoining his men, or sent the monks at the Great St Bernard hospice rations to
feed the troops when they arrived – and as he scrambled over the pass, would
have realised the extent of David’s flattery and fiction. Did he, as he passed
through Bourg-Saint-Pierre on his descent through the Val d’Etremont towards
Martigny, learn how a peasant from the village had guided Napoleon over the
pass, on a mule and in the rear of his army – so different from the heroics of
David’s canvas? It would take ten years, a snowstorm in Yorkshire and the
hubris of Napoleon’s Russian campaign before Turner felt able to deflate such
myth-making in the greatest of his Swiss pictures, ‘Snowstorm: Hannibal and
his Army Crossing the Alps,’ reducing the
ancient Carthaginian to whom Napoleon was often compared to invisibility in an
apocalyptic mountain blizzard.”

Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, 1812

I like this notion of the very
ordinary Mr Turner as the leveller of tyrants. Deftly underlining the genuine
measure of man against the reality of nature and the power of the elements,
grounded in his deeper, practical understanding and his geographical knowledge
of the locale. This is informed, and intellectually expressed, anti-propaganda
of the subtlest order. That said, though, it’s interesting to note another
painter, Paul Delaroche,whom I very
much admire, was later commissioned to paint a more realistic scene depicting
the crossing. This version, clearly echoing David’s, was not meant to be
demeaning, however, as Delaroche apparently admired Napoleon.

Last year I visited Martigny twice,
in winter and in summer. It is a small town, which dates back to at least the
Roman era (when it was known as Octodurus or Octodurum), tucked away in a steep
sided valley a short distance from the far eastern end of Lake Geneva, not far
from Mont Blanc – an ancient crossroads town with roads leading off to Italy
and France, as well as other parts of Switzerland. I was working at the
Fondation Pierre Gianadda, an art gallery whose grounds incorporate several
Roman ruins amidst a fine collection of modern art sculptures.

A little way down the road stands
the remains of a very fine Roman amphitheatre. Overlooking the town is La Bâtiaz, a small fort with a high
tower, which gives commanding views along the valley whose slopes are covered
with terraces laced with carefully cultivated vines. The wines of the Valais
region are, in my carefully considered (and equally savoured) opinion, one the
best little known secrets of Europe. Martigny is very proud of its heritage – and
certainly of its connections to famous artists such as Turner, plus poets and
writers, like the Shelleys and Lord Byron, who all passed through here; perhaps
unsurprisingly, though, less mention seems to be made of his nibs, ‘Old Bony’ –
Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1999 the Fondation Pierre
Gianadda, in collaboration with the Tate Gallery in Britain, hosted a wonderful
exhibition, titled: Turner et les Alpes. It
was a real pleasure to leaf through the catalogue for this exhibition, and to
compare it to the vistas which greeted you whilst walking around the town,
almost as it were as if one was peering over Turner’s shoulder in some places –
seeing him sketch out the scene in one of his sketchbooks, which were later
worked up into finished watercolours – like a window into his past.